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A network for the profession

Communication among CPAs has evolved dramatically, thanks to Barry Rice’s listservs. Those lists may be evolving, too.

By Bill Sheridan
Statement editor

Before blogs, wikis, Second Life, podcasts – heck, almost before the Web itself – there was Barry Rice.

Rice, an ameritus accounting professor and director of instructional services at Loyola College, is a technology fanatic. But he’s a fanatic with a purpose. For the past 15 years or so, he has taken his love for accounting and his love for technology and fused them. The result is a pair of groundbreaking “listservs” that have helped CPAs throughout the world … and forged more than a few friendships at the same time.

It all started February 1994, with Rice searching in vain for a way to obtain and share information and resources with his fellow accounting educators.

“There was no way to search the Web at all at the time,” he said. “I poked around and tried to find anything I could about accounting and CPAs, and nothing came up.”

Rice set out to change that by creating Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia, or AECM. It’s an e-mail listserv – a list of subscribers, each of whom can share information with the entire list at no cost by sending a message to a single e-mail address. It’s an extremely efficient way to share information with a large group of people, and among accounting educators, the concept caught fire.

“The whole idea was to provide a forum, to give faculty members a way to interact about the technology we use in our teaching,” Rice said. “It came at the right place at the right time, and it really took off.”

And how. Word spread, and soon hundreds of accounting educators from around the world had subscribed. The list was so popular that Rice started a second list called CPAs-L, a forum for the discussion “of all aspects of the practice of accounting.” Today, nearly 700 educators in more than 20 countries subscribe to the AECM list; 248 people subscribe to CPAs-L, mostly throughout the United States.

CPAs-L is almost strictly a Q&A list – someone will post a question, someone else will answer. AECM, though, has evolved into something entirely different. There are plenty of questions and answers, but subscribers will also find daily news, debates, research and – most surprisingly – budding personal and professional relationships.

“I am forever grateful to Barry for letting the original AECM evolve into what it is today,” said Bob Jensen, an emeritus accounting professor with Trinity University in San Antonio and one of the most prolific contributors to the AECM listserv. “He could have jumped on every message that was deemed not ‘on topic’ in the context of ‘computers and multimedia.’ Instead, he let the AECM messages follow their own serendipitous meanderings, and he forgave us for some of the dumb things we messaged.

“In this regard, we were lucky,” Jensen added. “AECM participants had the good sense to avoid some turn-off topics like politics, advertising, religion and too much humor. But the messaging did follow many serendipitous paths that were not tied to computers and multimedia, including topics of accounting theory, fraud, student cheating, professorial cheating, plagiarism, pedagogy in general, research methodologies and learning theories. These evolved into topics that AECM subscribers wanted to learn more and more about.”

Technology marches on, of course, and even the most effective listservs will eventually give way to the next hot communication tool. As always, Rice will be on the cutting edge. Part of his job, he says, is to “bring the rest of the faculty into the 21st century, technology-wise,” so he is constantly monitoring and experimenting with new technologies.

• Blogs and wikis have caught his eye, and he is providing resources for Loyola faculty members who want to use them as instructional aides in their courses.
• Social networking sites like Facebook are also on his radar screen, particularly because more than 90 percent of Loyola undergraduates have Facebook accounts. Rice has begun encouraging AECM and CPAs-L subscribers to create Facebook accounts and carry their collaborations to the next level.
• He also is intrigued by the possibilities offered in Second Life, a virtual site in which “residents” can interact with people throughout the world. The MACPA and Maryland CPA firm KAWG&F are among the first CPA entities to create presences in Second Life, and Rice is paying a work-study student to experiment with Second Life so that professors can start using the technology as part of their courses.

Still, it’s hard to give up on what works. And for their hundreds of subscribers, Rice’s listservs continue to work well.

“When I created it, I claimed that AECM was the first organized presence for accounting on the Internet,” Rice said, “and nobody has ever challenged that.”